Research
Active Projects
Swinging, Fast and Slow: Interpreting variation in baseball swing tracking metrics ⚾
w/ Ron Yurko
to appear in The American Statistician
2024 Cascadia Symposium on Statistics in Sports (Vancouver)
2024 Saberseminar (Chicago)
Lead distance under a pickoff limit in Major League Baseball: A sequential game model ⚾
w/ Sivaramakrishnan Ramani, Jacob Hahn and Andrew Schaefer
2024 Cascadia Symposium on Statistics in Sports (Vancouver)
2024 Saberseminar (Chicago)
Ball path curvature and in-game free throw shooting proficiency in the National Basketball Association 🏀
w/ Ruoqian (Judy) Zhu and Dave Love
2025 New England Symposium on Statistics in Sports (Boston)
A comps-based approach for interpreting tree-based predictions with an application to the NFL draft 🏈
w/ Elisabeth Millington
2025 Carnegie Mellon Sports Analytics Conference (Pittsburgh)
2025 New England Symposium on Statistics in Sports (Boston)
Pitch trajectory density estimation for predicting future outcomes ⚾
w/ Vicente Iglesias
2024 Conference of Texas Statisticians (Houston)
2023 Saberseminar (Chicago)
Published Projects
Estimating individual contributions to team success in women’s college volleyball 🏐
Powers S, Stancil L, Consiglio N (2025)
Journal of Quantitative Analysis in Sports 21(2) 117-135
2024 Sloan Sports Analytics Conference (Boston)
2023 New England Symposium on Statistics in Sports (Boston)
Nuclear penalized multinomial regression with an application to predicting at bat outcomes in baseball ⚾
Powers S, Hastie T, Tibshirani R (2018)
Statistical Modelling 18(5-6) 388-410
2016 Joint Statistical Meetings (Chicago)
A linear model for estimating optimal service fraction in volleyball 🏐
Burton T, Powers S (2015)
Journal of Quantitative Analysis in Sports 11(2) 117-129
Mutually-antagonistic interactions in baseball networks ⚾
Saavedra S, Powers S, McCotter T, Porter MA, Mucha PJ (2010)
Physica A: Statistical Mechanics and its Applications 389 1131-1141
Conference Presentations
Invited Talks
Winning baseball games by solving statistics puzzles ⚾
2025 International Conference on Statistics and Data Science (Vancouver)
Invited Panels
The Past, Present, and Future of Sports Analytics in Industry and the Academy
w/ Zach Knowlton, Stephanie Kovalchik, Mike Lopez, Brian Macdonald and Ron Yurko
2025 Joint Statistical Meetings (Nashville)
Data Science and Analytics in Sports Performance and Management
w/ Mark Broadie, Natalie Kupperman and Jill McNitt-Gray
2024 Columbia Symposium on AI and Sports (New York)
Student Talks
Modifying k-means clustering to optimize defensive positioning in volleyball 🏐
Naomi Consiglio @ Women in Sports Data Symposium 2024 (Philadelphia)
Do we learn more about AAA batters when they face better pitches? ⚾
Jeff Brover @ Saberseminar 2024 (Chicago)
Time warping for clustering pitcher deliveries ⚾
Drew Haugen @ Saberseminar 2024 (Chicago)
Student Posters
A statistical approach to sport climbing difficulty and progression 🧗
Elizabeth Sepúlveda @ Cascadia Symposium on Statistics in Sports 2024 (Vancouver)
Not All Features Are Created Equal: Player clustering and evaluation ⚽
Andrew Kang @ Opta Forum 2024 (London)
Wayback Machine
Jointly predicting exit velocity and launch angle for batter-pitcher matchups ⚾
2016 Saberseminar (Boston)
True wOBA: Estimation of true talent level for batters ⚾
2016 SABR Analytics Conference (Phoenix)
Rewarding batters for baserunner advancement: A ridge-regressed Rasch model ⚾
2015 Saberseminar (Boston)